Katz’s legacy in the production history is thus somewhat paradoxical: he was essential to getting the concept into the development pipeline, and he was absent for everything that happened after. The show he helped launch went on to define a significant portion of Desilu’s legacy; he was not present to see it.
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## The Specific Economics of Science Fiction
The budget pressures that ran through *Star Trek’s* production history were not simply a reflection of Desilu’s specific financial position. They reflected the particular economic challenge of producing science fiction for network television in the 1960s, a challenge that no studio had successfully solved before.
Science fiction requires production design. Contemporary drama — a police procedural, a medical drama, a legal series — can be filmed in existing locations and sets that approximate the real world. The audience’s existing knowledge of what a hospital or a courtroom looks like does the work of establishing the fictional world. Science fiction has no such shortcut. Every element of the visual world has to be designed and built: the ship, the control panels, the alien environments, the costumes, the technology. None of it can be borrowed from reality.
In the mid-1960s, the tools available for creating these visual elements were limited compared to what later decades would provide. Computer-generated imagery did not exist. The special effects of the era were practical effects: models, miniatures, optical printing, in-camera tricks. Creating the visual effects of a spacecraft traveling through space required building scale models and filming them on black backgrounds with controlled lighting. Creating alien planetary surfaces required constructing physical sets that suggested extraterrestrial environments.